Local mixed-use streets are significant elements of the historic urban landscape. Their slow and incremental development has made their buildings and uses adaptable, flexible and authentic. Retail-led development increasingly threatens these streets. Certain streets in Belfast city centre reflect the gradual and incremental transformation of the built environment, their uses through time, the people that inhabit them and their memories built in them. However, they are in danger of losing their dynamic authenticity if current development plans progress. In this paper, I will discuss the current situation of mixed use streets in Belfast that are at risk of demolition and redevelopment and will present the role that the SaveCQ campaign and the StreetSpace project have in disrupting and transforming the process of placeless commercial redevelopment.

- 13.50-14.25 Talk 2
Sandra Annunziata, adjunct Professor at Roma Tre University, Department of Architecture; visiting professor at the planning program of Cornell University in Rome.
"Gentrification and public heritage in Rome: potential, ambiguities and contradiction of the 'right to buy' policy as a strategy to stay put"

Gentrification in Rome is intertwined with architectural amenities and their central location. More in detail it is rooted in a slow and silent process of right to buy of historical public housing located in the city centre. The right to buy policy allows the sale of historical public housing to tenants and to their descendants at lower prices than the real estate value of the area. However, in the attempt to set the 'just' transaction prices, it produces a state-led induced rent gap (Smith 1979, Slater 2018) which facilitate patrimonialization processes of public architectural heritage. Drawing from The Politics of Staying Put in which tenure-ownership conversion is seen as a practice to "stay put" to save resident's home (Gallaher, 2016), the paper will argue the premises of the right to buy policies in the city of Rome, and explore the potential, ambiguities and contradiction of the resident's practices and discourses of becoming property owners in these location as a strategy of staying put.

Public art, docile bodies and the `post-conflict´ city
Heritage discourses are routinely used to legitimise regeneration and gentrification projects, typically through the branding of redeveloping urban quarters. Large-scale public art commissions are often especially important tools in these branding and `placemaking´ processes. This paper examines the particular ways in which these discourses and technologies converge in the spatial planning of `post-conflict´ Belfast, a city where primitive accumulation and private development have been given a moral dimension, as guarantors of `peace´. The paper also suggests other ways in which to imagine art, as a critical discourse capable of interrupting prevalent urban practices, and of producing critical urban publics.

- 15.20-16.00 Open discussion

The next and the last event of the lecture series is 18th December 2018:
"Post-Industrial city: heritage, futures, and present conflicts."

WELCOME!
Feras, Chiara and Daniel

Bios:
- Agustina Martire is a lecturer in Architecture at Queen's University Belfast specialised in urban history and theory. She studied architecture at Universidad de Buenos Aires, carried out her PhD in TU Delft and worked as a post doc in UCD Dublin before joining Architecture at Queen's. She is currently leading StreetSpace, an international project on the analysis of urban mixed use streets, from a multidisciplinary perspective, which sheds light on the way urban spaces are used, experienced and represented. This is linked to a series of workshops that have been carried out in schools of architecture in the UK and abroad.

- Sandra Annunziata is Adjunct Professor at the University of Roma Tre, Department of Architecture and visiting professor at the planning program of Cornell University in Rome. She has worked on gentrification and displacement and on practices of resistance across several cities. Her recent publications in the field are "Resisting gentrification" with Alonso Rivas in Handbook of practices of gentrification, Lees and Philipps (eds), 2018; "Resisting Planetary Gentrification: The Value of Survivability in the Fight to Stay Put", with Lees and Rivas Alonso in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2018, 108:2; "A comparison of tenurial change in two Garden City communities: Sunnyside Gardens, New York City and Garbatella, Rome", Planning Perspectives, 2017, 32:1.

- Daniel Jewesbury is an artist and writer, and a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Valand Academy, Gothenburg University. Daniel has been researching urban development for 20 years, in both his published writing and his art practice. He has just completed a film, Necropolis, which was filmed in cemeteries in Berlin, London and Belfast, and which examines the death of the modern ideal of the city.